Old King Coal. Not so merry.

Coal miners have been around for a awhile. 

Mining is dirty, dangerous work, that doesn't take a lot of education, just mostly muscle and courage. And a desire to take care of your family.
Especially in rural areas where the coal is found, West Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri, to name just a few. Miners generally have a pretty tough life, filthy, back-breaking work, for long hours. As long as the employer can legally require, that's how many hours a coal miner will work.

I just drove through Ludlow, Colorado where an abomination against humanity took place a while back. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre)

Fortunately, thanks to the unions and the incredible war-like struggles that they went through to get the miners a living-wage and some protections, the miners can enjoy a somewhat normal standard of living. A liveable standard, even though these mines tend to be in horrible, back-woods locations where the boom-town economies inflate all the costs that the miners incur. Many of these miners have worked the mines for generations, so much so that it's the only existence that they've ever known, or that they can even contemplate. The job is so ingrained with the life and the culture, that the miners, not only put up with the horrible conditions that the employers thrust upon them, they defend it against all logic and against their own well-being.
The nation should be getting off coal. And petroleum. And Natural gas.

It's obvious. Coal is a dirty source of fuel and mining kills miners through bad and unsafe practices and disease. There are natural, renewable sources of power generation that we can transition into, and these miners can, with very little adaptation, be transitioned into without the loss of any income. These types of energy can, and will, be in the same rural locations where these workers now live. But there's a catch. Isn't there always? The fossil fuel energy companies have powerful and deep-pocketed lobbies that won't allow that to happen.

Workers need to be educated in these things. (another reason that the rich and the corporations are dead-set against any public education) The Politicians and the corporations aren't your friends. They fought against your rights every step of the way and killed countless miners who only wanted to make life better for their families.

Let's get out there and help these people, because by helping them, we help ourselves.
The best way to get even with the Robber Borons, is to make what they stole from us, and our planet, worthless.
Let's do it.
Baby steps...

It works if YOU work it.

This is exactly the way representative, participatory democracy should work. It's a little slow, admittedly, but the more we participate, the better and faster it will become.

After years of cajoling the White House, the solar panels are back on the White House. The lord and savior of the republican/oligarchic party Ronnie RayGunz spent time, energy and presumably money to remove the solar panels that had been installed by Carter. Had those panels been allowed to remain, who can say where research and development might have taken us by now in the renewable energy industry?
Filthy, polluted water-under-the-bridge.

Bill McKibbon and his group 350.org and their fans have turned the Obama administration around on this one aspect of the argument. Good on 'em!
The Keystone XL Pipeline has coughed it's last disgusting tarry-oily death knell, since The Truth is almost always more powerful than what the Koch's want.

Obama is playing the long-game and in order to do it, he MUST have the grass-roots (you and me) help him. All of this hard work is designed to be a sort of political ju-jitsu, in order to make these changes look natural and organic. And it's working. The bonus is that it also makes all the greedy corporations and politicians look like idiots. I LOVE that.
Keep it up!
Baby Steps...

Global Climate CHANGE. (look it up)

Why oh, why is everybody having SO much trouble with the concept of climate change?
If you've been outdoors lately, it should be obvious.

Oh, yeah. Science. The devil's workshop. The devil's "Call of Duty".
Science. The one thing that hurts God more than the scourging of Jesus.
Science. The battle rages on between science and, uh, who?

Temperatures HAVE gone up. It's a fact that has been recorded for a loooong time.
If you have ever studied meteorology or climatology, you know that all weather patterns are caused by changes in temperature. Changes in temperature are caused by how much of the Sun's radiation reaches a certain part of the planet, land OR water. The relationship between hot areas and colder areas cause high and low pressure zones, which combined with the rotation of the Earth, causes wind. Pretty simple. Amazing how powerful the Sun is! Hey, why doesn't someone figure out a way to harness all of that power? But that's another subject.

Then there are the semi-deniers. "Oh, there is a change in the weather, but there's no way it can be man-made." Really?  God gave us the Earth to do with as we see fit. Take all the resources and use what we want and throw the rest away. If I need a little bit of gas, why shouldn't I pump thousands of gallons of some toxic chemical soup, the contents of which, I won't tell you, into the ground to filter wherever it happens to go. Once we get the coal, who cares where the ash and waste from the process goes?

The way I understood it, God gave man Dominion over the Earth, to be a good caretaker. If I hired a caretaker for a facility and that guy threw trash all over the place, and refused to clean up, I for one would fire him. What if my caretaker treated all of the men women and children, as well as all of the animals, as if they were just an inconvenience, out the door. Pink-Slip.

The big fallacy is throwing things away. There is NO AWAY. The Earth is a closed system. Suppose you lived in a deep sea diving suit, with a tank of air and a years supply of food and water. Within a few days your suit would start filling up (from the bottom, you know, gravity). After a few weeks, you'd be sloshing around in a soup of human waste products. How long do you think it would take till that suit was filled? And you Drowned in Your Own Shit? But thank god, it's not man-made.

The Closed system that is Our Earth is the same way. People that DON'T believe this are either incredibly stupid, or are interested in something other than long-term survival for the planet. If your greed blinds you to these simple truths, I hope we are all gone before you drown in your own shit. Maybe you can build a life raft out of your money. I sincerely hope not.

Those of you who believe in saving the planet, keep working!
Baby Steps...

Sometimes thing happen just like you planned.

In a past post, I mentioned that you might be able to ask your landlord to consider making some changes that would affect our impact on the planet. Well, by golly, my landlord did just that.
Recently our complex installed hot water-on-demand in all of the buildings. Not only does the water operate on this system, so does the heat (which is hot water). I'm not going to pretend that their motives were environmental and altruistic, in fact, I'm sure they are just enjoying the HUGE energy savings, but I'll take what I can get.
In fact, that is exactly how it works. Once businesses realize that they can actually save money by doing the right thing, hey, look at that, they start doing the right thing.
Baby Steps...